Playwright Athol Fugard Dead at 92. Ties to New Haven Theaters

Athol Fugard, the great South African playwright died on Saturday night at his home in Stellenbosch, a town near Cape Town. He was 92. His wife, Paula Fourie, confirmed his death after a cardiac event. Many of his works played and premiered in New Haven at Yale Repertory Theatre and Long Wharf Theatre where he found a friendship with its then artistic director Gordon Edelstein.

I interviewed Fugard several times over the decades, especially for shows premiering at Long Wharf Theater because of that close relationship with an Edelstein: world premieres “Coming Home” with Coleman Domingo, “Have You Seen Us” with Sam Waterston, and “The Train Driver” with Harry Groener.. Prior to Edelstein at Long Wharf there was “The Road to Mecca” with Julie Harris.

These are a few pictures I took of the writer who I thought would — and should — eventually win the Nobel Prize in Literature. One is with his second wife, PaulaFourie.

In 2008, he returned to New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre for the world premiere of his “Coming Home.” Prior to the production, he and director Edewlsteion, director of the play, traveled to South Africa. Along the way these “postcards” were sent to me and we published them in The Hartford Courant.

By FRANK RIZZO

When Athol Fugard asked Gordon Edelstein to stage the premiere of “Coming Home” in January at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, the playwright also invited the director to visit his home in South Africa and the remote, rural village that is the setting of several of his plays, including his latest.

It was an invitation that Long Wharf’s artistic director found impossible to resist, even if he would travel halfway around the world with the show’s set designer for a research trip that would last just a few days.

For nearly 50 years, Fugard (whose mother was an Afrikaner) wrote plays that reflected his native country’s struggle with Apartheid – as well as what life was like when white rule ended in the ’90s. “Blood Knot,” “Boesman and Lena,” “Sizwe Bansi is Dead,” “The Island,” “My Children! My Africa!,” “A Lesson from Aloes,” “The Road to Mecca” and “Master Harold . . . and the boys” depicted the lives of the dispossessed for the world to see.

Edelstein and Tony Award-winning set designer Eugene Lee (Broadway’s “Sweeney Todd,” TV’s “Saturday Night Live”) flew to Cape Town earlier this month before embarking on a long drive through the desert to the small town of Nieu-Bethesda, where “Coming Home” (as well as its related play, “Valley Song”) is set.

The 76-year-old playwright has a home in South Africa and one in San Diego.

Edelstein agreed to send The Courant dispatches from the trip.

This week, his first “postcard” describes the initial leg of his journey: an eight-hour drive through the semi-desert region of the Karoo, from Cape Town to the village of Nieu-Bethesda.

Next Sunday, Edelstein will describe his stay there, and on Sept. 28, he will describe a trip to Port Elizabeth (where Fugard was raised and the setting for several of his plays), returning to cosmopolitan Cape Town and his own thoughts on his journey into Fugard’s world.